What does Houston get from Trump besides mockery? [Editorial]

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally with Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, not pictured, in Houston, Texas, U.S., on Monday, Oct. 22, 2018. Trump declared that he's a "nationalist" at the rally as he appealed to Texas Republicans to re-elect Cruz and help the party keep control of Congress. Photographer: Sergio Flores/Bloomberg

Photo: Sergio Flores / Bloomberg

A few months ago, President Donald Trump announced on Twitter that he’d soon be coming to Texas to do “a major rally for Senator Ted Cruz,” or “Lying Ted,” as Trump called him for much of the 2016 presidential election. That acrimony is all over now, Trump told reporters on the White House lawn on his way here. Cruz is now “Beautiful Ted,” the president said, and he was on his way to help out his friend.

That’s the president for you; always thinking of ways to serve others.

Something must have gotten lost in the mail, though. The rally for Cruz never materialized, yet Cruz, ever the helpful sort, was nonetheless willing to be a supporting speaker for a tremendous and very huge rally for the president himself, who descended on the Toyota Center Monday night for the sort of high-energy and ribald party we’ve come to expect from him. Trump knows how to put on a show, there’s no doubt about that.

If you happened to catch some of the pre-show, where a line of Texas politicians killed time for the president, you might even have seen some of Cruz’s perfunctory 13-minute speech. He quickly got off his stage for Trump, the man the audience was here to see, who spoke for more than 75 minutes. What, actually, did he come here to say?

“I know Texas better than anybody,” Trump told the audience.

It would befit him to know Texas. It is the most important Republican state in the country and a cornerstone of the national economy. But he doesn’t seem any more familiar with the place than when he first came here as a presidential candidate in the fall of 2015.

The most tone-deaf section of the president’s speech came when he addressed the legacy of Hurricane Harvey. The Texas congressional delegation had to fight Trump tooth and nail to obtain sufficient relief funding, a shocking episode for a state that’s used to getting its way with Republican administrations. But that’s not how Trump recalled it.

“Did we help you with that lousy hurricane that you suffered through? That was brutal!” He was annoyed with all the rain from the storm. “I’m paying for that,” he remembered thinking.

He’s not paying, though. We are. We’re paying through our local property taxes for the Harris County Flood Control District, our sales taxes for city and state projects, and our income taxes for federal work. Trump, and much of his family, has done a good job of avoiding that pesky price for civilization, as the New York Times has recently reported.

Trump repeated a story he’d told before about the irresponsibility of some Texans during the hurricane. “These guys with the little boats, they think they have these great boats,” he said.

There was cheering in the audience, because the people who performed boat rescues in Houston are remembered as heroes. But Trump wasn’t done.

“Where do these people come from? They want to go out and they want to go into the hurricane, to show their wife how great they are? And then they get out there and they say, ‘Oh my god, I’m dead.’”

The martyrs of Harvey are apparently nothing more than a punchline for Trump.

Perhaps the worst part of the speech came when he ridiculed Gov. Greg Abbott’s meek attempt — according to Trump — to secure money for the Ike Dike coastal storm surge barrier. Abbott called him after Harvey, he said, to ask for “only ten billion” dollars, after already having pressed for “billions and billions” of hurricane relief. “I said Greg, that’s the most expensive dam I’ve ever heard of … Would you name it the Trump Dam, please?”

Trump’s policies on trade and immigration are uniquely opposed to the interests of the city of Houston, which has been key to the Republican Party since the early days of George H.W. Bush. Carnivals like the rally Monday ought be an opportunity to ask: What are we getting from any of this?

“From the medical center to NASA to the port, there is no stronger advocate for Houston than Ted Cruz,” said Sen. John Cornyn. But that simply isn’t true. Cruz has been a bystander to issues facing the city at best. It fell to Rep. John Culberson to do a good deal of the work to secure Harvey relief funding, and he skipped the rally.

We agree wholeheartedly with at least one thing the president said, though: “You gotta get out and vote.”